Does your small business cause you to feel stressed, moody, and overwhelmed? It could be because you have too much work to handle. But, more often than not, lack of organization skills is the problem that has led to the feeling of too much work.

Don’t ignore the clutter. Important documents, business cards, information, and, yes, sometimes bugs (especially in swampy areas), can be found squashed between piles and piles of paper and folders. And when you need a document in that growing pile, it takes up too much of your time to sift through it all.

Creating a well-organized workspace will save you enormous amounts of time and frustration, and it will relieve unnecessary stress from your life. Solid structure is what keeps things from falling apart.

When you organize your tasks and priorities, you’ll feel a great sense of relief. So sit down with a pen and paper, take a deep breath, and begin organizing your thoughts. Make a list of ways to organize your office. Do you need more filing space? Do you have a stack of paperwork that needs to be filed? What can you do today to organize important information?

Ways to organize your life:

Spreadsheets: Create four separate spreadsheets: contacts, tasks to be performed, monthly budget, and statistics. The “contacts” spreadsheet should have your important contacts, clients, employees, and business partners in alphabetical order. This eliminates the extra work of always having to look up an email address or phone number of a company by visiting their website. The “tasks to be performed” spreadsheet should include categories such as task, due date, cost, and priority.

The “monthly budget” spreadsheet will help you keep track of how much money you plan on using during that month, monthly pay, monthly earnings, outsourcing costs, and more. Also, focus on future projects and how much those may cost. The “statistics” spreadsheet could include a dozen different items, such as your blog stats, website traffic, number of clients (increase or decrease from the previous month), and success of a product / service.

Hit delete: If your inbox is suffocating with the build-up of information you no longer need, empty it. It’s important to clear the way for new information and store any of the old in a folder on your computer. Seeing an organized inbox every day will make you feel less stressed.

Organize important documents and business cards: These important documents should go in labeled folders and be organized into a filing cabinet. It would be highly effective for you to have folders with personal information separate from business folders.

Finish a project before moving on to the next: This goes for business projects as well as home projects. Don’t put off what could be done today. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself overloaded with unfinished business and, therefore, more stressed.

Don’t save more than you need: Sometimes people save magazines, photos, books, newspapers, and other items that only create clutter. We even forget why we saved them in the first place. When going through a magazine, for example, take out the pages you need and place them into categorized folders. Throwing the rest of the magazine away will eliminate the extra space an entire magazine would take up. 

It’s not difficult to organize your life. With the right mindset and the right tools to get the job done, you’ll find yourself with more time and less stress.

 Unless “more” is one of the categories (which is how it sounds as is) I would delete this.  The use of the phrase “such as” implies that there are more possible categories.

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